


Where we were always going....

by ThatwasJustaDream



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, Season/Series 09, spoilers for S9 if only vague ones...
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-28
Updated: 2013-10-28
Packaged: 2017-12-30 17:15:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1021299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThatwasJustaDream/pseuds/ThatwasJustaDream
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written before Tuesday can get here, beat my heart into mush and make me sell my tv for scrap plastic. Sam is free of the intruder. Dean takes care of Cas, then Cas takes care of Dean. They're going to be fine... for now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Where we were always going....

**Author's Note:**

> Written in part for the 1_million_words comm and the Slow, Sated Sundays feature. The prompt: You talk in your sleep and/or steal the blankets.

Castiel’s vessel jumps as he wakes. Every time. He wonders if that’ll ever stop.

“My _body_ ,” he thinks, sinking down. “My _only_ vessel …now and forever.”

He understands it’s his brain causing those jolts, the shots of ‘fight or flight’ rolling through him. Comprehending it is one thing. Living through it daily is…. wearing. Then it hits him where he is for _this_ particular awakening and suddenly _relief_ – warm and bright and almost unbearably sweet - washes the adrenaline away.

“Who is Yophiel?” 

Dean’s voice, scratchy and deep. Cas realizes confusion must be on his face when Dean juts his chin at him. “You were calling for him. Didn’t sound like anything good was happening.”

“He was a brother of mine, obviously. We were part of a group ... protecting a colony of early humanoids. We lost him in an extremely painful way. For him and for us all.”

“How …early?” Dean is lying on his side, arms around a pillow. He’s on top of the sheet and blanket that Cas is under and angled slightly diagonally to him – the better to watch him sleep.

“Very. Early.” He doesn’t want to think about it anymore. Doesn’t want to cast a strong light on the many differences between them. “I don’t like dreaming. It’s surreal.”

“You’ll have good ones, buddy. Someday. Once all this is ….”

Cas gets why Dean stops there. 

“Shit, I’m so glad you agreed to come back. I was afraid you’d … I don’t know. Guess I thought I was crazy for even asking….”

“You’re not crazy,” Cas turns on his side to reinforce his words with a steady gaze, as strong as Dean’s is weary. “And you know it.”

~~*~~

It’s less than fifteen hours since the cell phone in his backpack rang.

He’d been sitting in a train station, a couple of hundred miles from them. He scrambled for the phone, nearly missed it, then agreed to stay there and wait. He counted down hours and minutes, walking outside to the parking lot and watching the Impala pull up. The timing; it felt almost like when he could sense him with his mind.

“You look like hell,” Dean said when he slid in. His chin went up, and he bit the inside of his lip to stop from asking whose fault that might be?

“Tell me,” he ditched the bag in the back seat. “What’s happening?”

“I got used,” Dean blurted. “I screwed up. Thought I was doing the right thing for Sam, for all of us but it was a trick and I fell for it. Damn rookie mistake…”

Cas huffed out a sound embarrassingly full of ‘yeah, I get that, how are you enjoying that feeling?’ as he settled into the seat, glad for soft leather and warmth from the air vents.

“I nearly got him killed saving him. He’s…. free, now, but barely hanging on. Kevin’s watching him ‘til we get back but …I don’t know what we’ll find. We could lose him.”

Dean spent the drive explaining, and he mostly listened. They’d gone straight to see Sam when they arrived and found him alive but so deeply out, Kevin changing the sheets under him like a pro, as if he’d been nursing for years.

“I’ve got this,” Kevin gave Cas a nod hello, barely stopped what he was doing. “I’m jacked up on java, but someone needs to spell me by tomorrow morning. Deal?”

They’d gone to the kitchen and Dean finished the story standing by the stove, fixing something. Cas barely noticed until a bowl slid in front of him on the table; fragrant with an obscene amount of stew and hot bread with melting butter.

It brought back memories of the one good hour he’d had before…that moment. And now the bowl, the spoon in his hand went wetly blurry as he fought the surge of fear they might be pulled out from under him again. Not the bowl, the spoon… _them_.

“Don’t, Cas, I _mean_ it.” Dean gritted out as Castiel was bringing the first bite to his mouth. “If you cry, I swear …”

He nodded, shoveling in the stew, barely waiting for it to cool. 

He won the battle for composure.

“You should sleep after you eat. We’re gonna be busy getting Sam through this…”

“I don’t sleep. I can give Kevin a break.”

“What do you mean, you don’t sleep? You _have_ to, now, or …” 

Dean was standing to his right, arms folded lightly but Cas kept his head down. He didn’t want to look at him too directly until he was calmer.

“I doze; an hour or half an hour. It’s… too hard, otherwise. It feels… unnatural, falling into it and coming out of it. It’s hard to explain how… sickening it is. I hate it.”

“All these weeks? And you haven’t had a good night’s…No wonder you look….” Dean’s voice trailed off. 

A hand dropped to his left shoulder, and he put down the bread long enough to fling it off.

“Don’t push me away. Eat, and then hit the shower, okay? And I’ll sit watch over you ‘til you sleep. You _have_ to.”

He resisted the urge to remind him he didn’t _have to do_ anything. Then he’d found his room and Dean stretched out next to him and the pure, tactile joy of food in his stomach and a warm, soft bed instead of a bench or a sidewalk? He sank into the first, woozy layer of semi-awareness so fast, fought off the way it made his stomach drop and twist by glancing through his heavy lids at him.

Dean was giving him that look in return, the one he knew well; relieved and sorrowful at the same time, the tiny flicker of an aching smile traveling from his lips, through his whole face ‘til it reached eyes, made them shine with a wistful hurt.

 _Fucker_. He knows what that look does to him.

Cas closes his eyes.

A hand cups around the back of his head, a thumb tracing the spot on his cheek next to his ear, and this time when he sinks deeper and his body jumps, there's a long, soft ‘shhhhhhh’ sound, and the sensation of Dean pulling in closer.

He tumbles straight into oblivion.

~~*~~

“Your turn. Rest. I’ll go….” 

He flipped back the covers, adjusted the boxers and t-shirt Dean had loaned him. They were more than a touch loose and very well worn; smelled like cotton and detergent and felt like him. Comfortable. Familiar. Right.

“Not sure I can sleep. Look, Cas, I _need_ to know; did I screw things up past fixing? I’m not being cute. Just tell me yes or no?”

He’d half rolled out of bed but turned back to him now, collecting his thoughts. He recalled the days after his own screw up with the Leviathans, how hard he’d apologized over and over and the stony reception each ‘I’m sorry’ had met. 

But this, he knew, was as close as Dean could come to apologizing, ever.

“There are times….” He reached and set a hand against Dean’s chest. “…when you’re the only being in the universe – human, angel or otherwise – that I have any connection to. So no. I don’t think you _can_ screw it up beyond fixing.”

‘I need you too much.’ 

He thought that last part. Didn’t say it.

“Good,” Dean looked relieved, if not happy, then reached to catch his arm when he started to get up again. “Hey, Cas? Come here….”

And now he was being pulled in, urged down, Dean up on one elbow hitching a leg over him and leaning in to kiss him. Everything in him wanted to say ‘wait, not _yet_ , I’m not ready… not done being pissed at you’ and yet….oh, he’d wanted this too much to wait. _That_ day… it could be weeks away.

So he opened up to it, their first kiss, let Dean drive it but matched him stroke for stroke and suck for bite. He loved on the sweet, distressed, excited sound Dean made when Cas got his fingers in his hair and tugged – almost, not quite, hard enough to pull them apart.

“Son of a _bitch_ ,” Dean gasped when Cas did pull away, slotting their legs and starting to grind against him. “You did not learn this from little miss flavor of the month….”

“It’s been a while,” He rolled him over, as their tumble turned into a sweet wrestling match, and that was good, too. “And I haven’t spent all these weeks in train stations. Disappointed?”

“Hell, no,” Dean got the upper hand again, put him on his back and kneeled up, flipping off his own shirt and unzipping. “C’mon; clothes off. Now.”

He had significantly less to shed, so he used the free time when he was done to watch Dean losing the jeans, socks, opening the drawer in his nightstand, rooting around in it. 

“You do know,” he said as Dean returned, flipped him a condom with a nod that asked him to open it and flicked open the bottle in his hand, “...this can’t be _only_ a fuck for me?”

“You think?” 

The tone of it, the ‘this was so always where we were going’… he can’t help but laugh as Dean slicks him, as he reaches in between them, sliding on the condom, watching those eyes squeeze shut at the sensation of being sheathed by another hand and then stroked with a firm, fast grip. “Stop…woah, stop, Cas, _fuck_ stop that…”

Half of him wants to tease him to death but the other half wants what’s next, so he slides down, legs slung wide. A second later he’s up on his elbows and sucking in air as Dean takes him and….

“Fuck, yes, _unnngh_ , harder, you can… oh… _fuck_ , go harder… _now_ …”

“Don’t tell me you’re talking dirty already. I can’t…even…stand that….”

It’s all grunts and shouts and sweetly dropped f-bombs from then on, until he hears how close Dean is and reaches to finish himself off, to come around him in fast, strong pulses that make him shout _‘Casti-elll…’_ all ragged and torn up as he comes, too, and _yes_ ….that sounds about right for them.

Ragged and torn. Check, and check.

“Sleep,” he tells Dean after he’s gone to get hot towels to make him clean, settled him in underneath the blanket he himself just slept under. “If no one comes to tell you otherwise…everything’s okay.”

Cas catches a reflection of himself in the armoire mirror as he leaves, and it makes him stop on the way to Sam’s room to grab grapes, apples, cheese, some water in case Sam wakes up. 

They all need to get well. Get ready. They’ve got work to do.


End file.
